There are probably only a few artists who are conversant in the topic of “pasture management.” Melissa Miller, now in residence at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas, is one of them.

“Pasture management was big in our family,” said Miller, who grew up in Texas with grandparents who were ranchers. “What grasses do you grow? What natural grasses do you keep? What animals do you mingle? Where do you move them? How much do you let them eat? That’s all part of pasture management.”

In a sense, Miller still practices pasture management, although her pastures are of her own making and the animals are ones she’s seen during her walks around rural Texas and her investigations into natural history.

Throughout a career spanning three decades that includes showings at the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennial and exhibits in museums from Houston to Washington, D.C., Miller has dedicated herself to painting animals — farm animals, wild animals, exotic animals — all kinds of animals.

In her carefully rendered, highly detailed, at times disconcerting canvases, she creates subtle narratives in which the animals are the key characters.

“It really was never my intention to just stick with animals,” Miller said. “But they’ve become a pivot for me to explore a lot of different things. When I paint, I’m interested in composition and color and narrative and exploring. And because I have my animals, kind of like Morandi had his bottles, I’m able to do that. They still are a very functional subject matter for me.”

Even her colleagues have gotten confused that the emphasis in her art is the art and not the animals.

“I have friends who teach, and they’ll say, ‘I have a student doing animals and I showed them your work’,” she said. “And I think, ‘Why don’t you show them my work when you have a student interested in a certain kind of brush stroke, or a kind of expression?’

“I don’t want to be an animal painter; I want to be a strong painter who uses animals and employs them in a certain way.”

Animal instincts

Growing up in rural Texas, where she showed an affinity for animals even as a child, Miller was not encouraged to develop her artistic tendencies. But when she arrived at the University of Texas at Austin and walked into the art building, her path was set.

“I just knew, this is where I belong,” she said. “And I never looked back. I have no idea why I thought I could do that, or where it came from. But it was just very apparent to me in a flash.”

In Austin, and later at the University of New Mexico, she was schooled in abstract expressionism. She learned an intuitive way of working, and the process only reinforced her love of painting.

“I learned a lot about the brush stroke, and the fact it could be both form and content,” she said. “And I learned about the ‘artist’s hand,’ which went very much out of favor in the ’90s, but I never lost my love for it.”

But the actual content of abstract expressionism held little personal attraction for her, and after graduation, she returned to the farm in Texas and started what would become her lifelong pursuit: painting animals.

“I began finding my own content out of school, and that was the subject matter that was available to me,” she said. “That was what I knew. It’s the old adage: Write what you know. Paint what you know.”

If conceptual art and performance were moving toward center stage in the art world and painting in general was being relegated to the sidelines, that had little bearing on her work.

“I never assumed I’d have much of a career as an artist,” she said. “I just thought I’d paint and I’d paint for the rest of my life. But I’d probably have to do something else. And I did. I taught, at least until two years ago,” when she retired from the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

But she doesn’t call it retirement.

“In our house, we call it switching jobs,” she said. “So now I’m back in the studio full-time. It’s not nearly retirement, but it’s a better job. And it’s a job of my own choosing.”

Problem-solving

Miller has long had a home and studio in what was once rural Austin, where she still works and spends time walking and observing the wildlife. But increasingly, the scene is changing.

“The city grew to me, and so I’ve watched over the last 30-something years as species change and their habits change,” she said. “I’ve been able to observe that very closely.

“And I do a lot of walking in rural Texas, and you can hardly go any distance without seeing some kind of trash, or something that has been affected by humans. So I’ve started putting that in the paintings.”

Her interest in Asian art is also finding its way into her work, as she’s experimenting with perspective and making the narrative aspects of her work increasingly subtle (although no less important).

“Especially in Japanese art and Korean art and Chinese art, they seem to put animals in a different context,” Miller said. “They are more interested in them and their particular worlds and portraying them as they are, and less interested in anthropomorphizing them, or using them ironically.

“They seem to just sort of appreciate their being, their psyche, their nature.”

Animal nature doesn’t preclude an element of the theatrical, especially as Miller has recently been rendering one of nature’s great dramas: predator and prey.

“Doing that was prompted by personal issues,” Miller said. “That’s usually what prompts the next thing. You get involved in something, or interested in something.

“Paint is a way for to sort of read my own life and figure out things. Things can be solved with paint — at least for me.”